[recoiledsnake]

This is really sad. Their dev tools were really horrible though and they weren't able to come out from their nice of mail and messaging which other smartphones started doing as well if not better leading to a BYOD(Bring your own device) culture at the workplace. Who wants to carry two phones and keep them charged?

On the bright side, they're still making money with a steady and increasing BIS revenue stream, BBM is getting popular in Europe and Asia and BB10 is on the horizon, I doubt it can save them unless BB10 is leaps and bounds better than the rivals. They have improved the user experience and the dev tools, but remember what happened to Palm with their excellent WebOS, it's really hard to sell phones because of network effects and few available apps(chicken and egg problem).

[Gustomaximus]

With the lack of apps I feel no sympathy. I was working on and off with a company trying to get a well known app onto their store. Because of onerous T&C's that essentially said they had rights to revenue we made in app, our lawyers asked us to have this clause amended. Initially I thought no problem, we have done this a bunch of times and it is usually a quick turnaround. It took over 2 years of faffing about and was by far the worst app store experience I had to deal with.

[cleaver]

I looked at doing BB development when it was it's prime. It was too expensive to get into and the cost of a BB enterprise server was prohibitive for a amall shop.

[andrewpi]

It's been a while since I've looked into it, but last I looked, all the required tools were free/open-source, and the only requirement to be a BlackBerry developer is/was a $20 signing key.

[oz]

I believe signing keys are now free.

[icki]

BB10 has the WebWorks platform for HTML5/CSS/JS ninjas and Cascades which makes writing with the Native SDK a breeze (coming from a current Android dev who is really considering the switch).

https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/ https://developer.blackberry.com/html5/